I’ve been playing dark souls 2 scholar of the first sin and I’m presently on the iron keep… this is perhaps the most god hand-like section in any souls game ive played at least with like tryhard iaidō knights armed with “blacksteel katana” running at you it’s incredible fun really
I’m one of those people who is like continually fascinated by the compressed space of things like passages from majula to the other areas or the elevator to iron keep
dark souls 2 has the magic imo
The Falconeer, another free Epic game. This is basically a light Elite-like that takes place in a Dishonored-esque word of tiny island city-states. You pilot a giant falcon and shoot down airships and steamboats and etc. I wish it was as cool as it sounds, but it’s actually kind of boring. I was really hoping for a new Crimson Skies but the game is way too limited with offering you loadouts and the flight model is just kind of limp and pseudo-arcadey. There’s an allegedly open world but there’s no particular reason not to just do all the story missions in a row from your home base, after poking around for a while it’s not clear that the other places offer any resources that would significantly improve your bird. I gave it about 3 hours, hoping that there was just an extended tutorial phase and at some point the game would open up and make tooling around doing sidequests worthwhile, but I was apparently underleveled to start the second plot-chunk and would just get shredded by swarms of highly agile robot guys who I could neither escape nor dodge. Disappointing.
There’s a new game coming out in the same universe called Bulwark and it’s a city builder. Seems cooler than this one turned out to be.
Revisiting Bayonetta Origins and cleaning up collectibles and other optional stuff. It’s generally a pleasant world to just be in. Have enjoyed revisiting it and checking my feelings about it. I think it does suffer from 100%ing though. There’s an extra chapter that opens up which focuses on Jeane and ties into Bayonetta 3 which I didn’t really care for since I don’t care for that game.
The other major drawback is the map design. The world is broken up into little areas and is a continuous whole but the map cannot be viewed as a whole and the entrances and exits to areas are not clear until you actually travel to them. Not only this but some maps are oriented to North while others aren’t so you have to check the player’s map icon direction a lot to properly navigate. Some collectibles are only accessible from one specific exit of a previous area which is hard to access itself and I’ve done several laps of the entire ‘right’ side of the map. I’ve been using a guide (from Sports Illustrated of all things) but it’s the only one to actually annotate the maps. The images are broken on the site but preserved through small google image previews so this is the most cobbled together cleanup of a game I’ve done in quite some time. It has that Gamefaqs energy where the game is so obscure there’s only one guide but it doesn’t adequately describe the steps you need. Slowly getting to 100% but it requires I platinum all time trials which feels like it might be a step too far for me. The fun is cleaning the forest, not doing co-op switch puzzles in record time.
I played the On Your Tail demo. I like it. I think the cosy/wholesome experience is something I occasionally need despite it becoming a whole thing. You’re a detective stuck in some coastal Italian town after a traffic accident and everyone is very friendly and also an anthropomorphic animal. The lead artist is very clearly a furry trying to keep things low key and the art is good at making the emotions infectious. I like it despite my silly gripe that the characters emote simultaneously in both the dialogue box art and through their 3D character model.
You collect cards for clues to solve mysteries but you collect the same cards as a way to highlight social links, activities and other non-clue phenomena so I appreciate the holistic grammar it wants to set-up as a detective/life sim hybrid.
One big issue is you can’t change the text scroll noise which is an aggressive bubble noise rather than character babble or a less intrusive choice. All SFX share the same volume slider and you can’t mute the bubbles.
Awkwardly it’s one of the games under the Humble Games label so… not sure what’s gonna happen. Hope they work something out somehow.
I played some of that new Capcom game Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess. It’s on Game Pass, so why not?
Everyone who noticed this game was saying that it feels like it’s coming to us direct from the PS3 era. They’re not wrong! There’s a palpable PS2/PS3 mid-budget jank kind of feeling to it that I find refreshing.
It’s sort of a tower defense / action hybrid with a Shinto theme. The game is structured in stages that follow day/night cycles. During the day, you prepare your defenses, and at night you have to fight off monsters until you can close their evil monster portal.
In the daytime, you visit a corrupted village and purify it, freeing villagers from big ol’ Xenomorph pod things. Once they’re freed, you can assign them different RPG style jobs and post them up around the village in good defensive locations.
You always control a samurai type guy, but you’re followed around by a nice magic lady who seems to be sort of a metaphor for the player… Like, your soldier is her summoned magical construct she controls. During the day, you have to draw a path for her to take through the village to get to the monster portal so she can purify it. Then, at night, she’ll inch along that path at an incredible snail’s crawl, while you use your soldier to defend her, fighting monsters alongside the villagers you posted up (who are basically your tower defense towers)
Between stages you can do some satisfying filler stuff like assign villagers to repair buildings to get resources you can use to upgrade their RPG classes (giving them stat increases and new moves).
I’m still at the beginning of the game, but I like it a lot! So far it’s fairly simple, but satisfying. Combat is basic, but you have a few button combo moves you can do that spice it up a little.
The aesthetics are beautiful. I’m not qualified to speak with any intelligence on it, but yeah, it’s sort of a classical Japanese mysticism kind of theme that sort of reminds me of SMT with a bit of Resident Evil’s campy monster designs. You and your magic mom and all your villagers are all wearing gorgeous ceremonial costumes, and whenever you do something right, everyone wheels around doing big festival dances. When you finish a stage, it practically does a Balan Wonderworld dance cutscene!
Look! At this menu screen! It’s some of the most deluxe skeuomorphism I’ve ever seen! There’s a lady just approvingly watching you play with the menus the entire time!
I also love this stage select screen:
You know, the more I think about it, the more I think it actually has Nintendo DS energy moreso than PS3 energy. I mean this in a very positive way.
Feels like a lost Vita game to me
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - the (actual) arcade game, extracted from the Steam version of TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection with GitHub - Masquerade64/Cowabunga: Decryption tool for Digital Eclipse assets.pie files. This tool was made in its entirety by SowwyItsAnAlt. and converted to MAME ROM format with RED-Project/ROM Extraction/tmnt-cc-arcade-extract.sh at master · farmerbb/RED-Project · GitHub (put in extracted roms/Konami dir and run in WSL w/ “./[script name]”).
I think I’m liking this game more the more I play it, which I didn’t expect. The Konami counter-attacking bosses aren’t too fun but the rest of the game is so well done that it’s still fun to play through.
Picking a turtle in MAME can be a bit of a pain 'cause they’re hard-coded to a certain player’s controls, ie if you want to play as Raphael you have to switch all your controls over to P4. And as a slightly oddity, after tripping a credit for your chosen player, you don’t press “Start” as the game prompts–you actually push the “jump” button.
Played through Estigma, a free step on every tile/Pac-Man-like hybrid from the maker of Tamashii. As always the main reason to play through their games is the aesthetics, which in this case are:
Game is broke into sets of three to four stages, you have to clear the set before the timer at the bottom the screen runs out (deaths restart the room you are on with the time not replenishing). The main mechanical twist is that while every tile must be stepped on once each one can be stepped on a second time without penalty (at which point they cannot be stepped on again) which makes pathfinding a bit more complex. Still it isn’t really that hard for the most part, it can be cleared in about a half hour, take in the taboo/heretical images.
(It also comes with an ARG that just leads to a reveal for the now released Tamashii follow-up, it’s not bad but can be ignored).
if switching turtles is a a thing you want to do easily, there was a Japan release in arcades that is 2-players and lets you select
Oh, interesting! There is a tmntj.zip ROM that extracts from the Cowabunga Collection… Ah, it’s a four-player version though.
make sure you do the a+b move that kills all the footclan dudes in one hit and then jump kick then jump kick away from the bosses so they cant counterattack you 
shredder is bullshit tho
Wait you mean you a+b the boss, then jump kick them, then jump away? I did try jump-kicking some of the later bosses when I got a bit desperate but those later ones at least just tended to swat me out of the air so it didn’t go great. = o Didn’t try doing it after an a+b though. (I kind of sucked with the a+b, too sloppy on hitting the keys together; I suppose I could set up a macro key if I wanted to be a bit cheap about it. ^ _^)
no a and b normla dudes that usually take two hits to kill and jumpkick the bosses. the a and b attack isnt quite at the same time, its either b first and then a right after or vice versa. i never noticed that it wasnt quite at the same time becuase i put my thumb over the buttons in a way that i just hit one slightly before the other all the time
you gotta get the timing down but like up to the ninja castle all of the bosses can get stun locked by jump kicks
the most satisfying boss to jump kick to death is the snow dog he’ll like grab a rock from the sky and you kick him just as it goes into his hands and he drops it then you jump kick away and kick him again as soon as another rock falls and he cant do shit
also you can avoid all the snowmobiles and holes by walking at the topmost of the screen on the nes version at least. ahh i love that game. except for the technodrome bosses
and yeah you can jump hit them if you hit them from as far as possible away and jump away but obv its harder, but it can be done!
always play the japan version of konami beat em ups, the world version always have fucked up difficulty. i’m fairly certain world versions of konami beat em ups did a lot of work in wrecking the whole genre’s popularity and reputation
i only played the nes version of tmnt2, i think i played the arcade mode like once and i just drooled at the graphics and dont remember much else
oh man also in the sewers when you just spam the a+b attack right next to the holes where thefuckers come out and kill them before tehy get a chance to do ANYTHING ah. and farming missles for points. ah. i want to play tmnt2, guess its time to find my cart
Final Fantasy Type Zero: i played about 5 hours of it in Japanese when I didn’t know nothing at release. Now I know ichi or futatsu things.
I don’t think I can handle it. The opening is trying to do 3 incompatible things and i think it is handling each well to a point. It is trying to show “war like sucks.” It is tryung to do anime-overblown but realistic political intrigue and it is trying to show off these cool anime teens.
A militarized mechanical nation invades the magic nation and sets down a magic jammer and starts just mowing down soldiers and civilians who can no longer use the magic to defend themselves. However a special high school class of anime teens are also the anime black-ops squad and can use magic no matter what so do cool anime stuff like stand around and walk slowly or are overly dramatic. Then the mechanized nation retreats purely on the strength of 13 anime teens when they were previously razing the capital city to the ground.
Then there was about 12 minutes of political intrigue and arrows on maps which I zoned out on because I don’t know this crap about the real world in Japanese and I am not about to try and follow this in fantasy bullshit.
It fades up on Chapter 2 and we are just at anime high school and I remember this also threw me for a loop 10 years ago. Like in the face of total war, maybe anime high school seems trite and petty? I stopped there. What stopped me before was you eventually also have to play an RTS.
This and 3rd Birthday did show S-E were absolute wizards at the PSP.
I found the start of this game fascinating for all these contradictory reasons though it very quickly becomes dull and repetitive afterwards, so no regrets stopping there.
I did like talking and playing as these kids until I had my few favorites. They each have their own unique little quirks and playstyle which hides that none of them plays that well if we’re being honest. It probably feels a lot more cohesive on the PSP
TCRF mentions Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Arcade) - The Cutting Room Floor that the JP version of TMNT (the actual arcade version) fixes a scoring exploit from the other versions where you could destroy infinitely recurring projectiles for points. (Oh hey I guess that applied to the US NES version too, as daphaknee mentions it as well. : ) They don’t mention any actual difficulty-related differences.
HM but yeah it is a later revision so I probably should be playing that one anyway. : D Thanks for mentioning it!
AH dang I didn’t make it sufficiently clear that I was playing the actual arcade version, not NES’s “The Arcade Game”; thanks for making that eternally confusing Konami. = PPP I’m not sure the two-button attack stun locks the bosses a whole lot in the arcade version–I tried it for a bit on the bird-headed boss with the flamethrower, who’s got Splinter tied up, but it didn’t look like it froze him for a particularly lengthy amount of time. … Watched my playback and in fact it doesn’t look like it froze him at all! It was a bit useful for its longer range (w/ Mike). I’ll have to experiment with that though.
And hm you could be on to something with the slightly offset button timing for that two-button attack, even in the arcade version; it could explain why I was struggling with the input so much. I’ll have to experiment with that, too; I’m playing on a pad set up NES-style, so the thumb thing could potentially work the same way. : )
I was thinking about going on and playing the NES version again as well but decided against it after finding in direct comparison that the walk speed is way slower in that one–which is probably why I resorted to constant jump kicks even just for moving around in that version when I played it in The Cowabunga Collection! ^ _^ I did like the added snow stage though.
